La victime coiffure

In the eighteenth century English men and women kept abreast of French styles through the use of “fashion babies,” dressed dolls which were regularly sent from Paris to London. In a period when the bizarre was often commonplace, one of the more striking fashions was the post-Revolution, 1790s technique for imitating the aristocrats who had gone to the guillotine. Englishwomen wore thin crimson ribbons around their necks and had their hair tousled, in a style termed la victime coiffure.